Poetry Reading: Morgan Parker and Natalie Shapero

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Morgan Parker is the author of There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé (Tin House Books 2017) and Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night (Switchback Books 2015). Her third collection of poems, Magical Negro, will be published by Tin House in 2019, and her debut book of nonfiction will be published later that year by One World, an imprint of Random House. Parker received her BA from Columbia University and her MFA from NYU. Her poetry and essays have been published and anthologized in numerous publications, including The Paris Review, The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, Best American Poetry 2016, The New York Times, and The Nation. Parker is the recipient of a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, winner of a 2016 Pushcart Prize, and a Cave Canem graduate fellow. She lives in Los Angeles.

Natalie Shapero is Professor of the Practice of Poetry at Tufts University and an editor at large of the Kenyon Review. Her poetry collections are Hard Child (Copper Canyon, 2017) and No Object (Saturnalia, 2013). Her writing has appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Poetry, The Progressive, and elsewhere. Holding advanced degrees in both creative writing and law, she has worked as a litigation fellow with Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Her awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, a Kenyon Review Fellowship, and a Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award.